The children who came to the monastery schools were of two kinds: the _oblati_,[1044] who remained and became monks, and those who attended the _schola exterior_ and lived a secular life after their education. The age at which they were admitted was an early one. Ennodius says that Epiphanius became a ‘lector’ at eight,[1045] and Sidonius that Bishop John of Châlons-sur-Marne was ‘lector ab infantia.’[1046] Nunneries, like the one at Arles, took children at six or seven—‘ab annis sex aut septem, quae iam litteras discere et obedientiae possit obtemperare’.[1047] Classes were generally held in the body of the church (_in inferiori Basilicae navi_[1048]) and the twenty-fourth canon of the fourth Council of Toledo (seventh century) probably represents the regular practice of our period. It provides that the children of the clergy should all be kept in one room to be trained in the ways of the Church, and that they should be entrusted to a senior person of approved character who was to give them both moral and intellectual instruction.[1049] We hear of a head master variously called in later times ‘Scholasticus’, ‘scholaster’, ‘capischola’ (_caput scholae_) ‘Decanus’, ‘Cancellarius’. ‘Cum igitur Levitas feceris’, wrote Remigius, ‘Archidiaconum institueris Primicerium scholae clarissimae.’[1050] A sixth-century inscription of Lyons[1051] reads: ‘In hoc tomolo requiescit famolus D̅I̅ Stefanus primicirius scolae lectorum....’ Private teaching, which had always gone side by side with the schools, increased in the fifth century among Christian parents for three reasons: the opposition of pagan to Christian education, which, amid the unorganized state of the monastery schools, often forced home-education upon parents; the fact that the pagan schools catered chiefly for the upper classes and that Christianity was now inspiring the masses with a desire for instruction; and the influence of the monastic ideal which shunned public contact for fear of contamination.